Flip The Switch

[sharing tagline="Share This Post On" tagline_color="" title="" link="" description="" pinterest_image="" icons_boxed="" icons_boxed_radius="4px" box_colors="" icon_colors="" tooltip_placement="" backgroundcolor="#ffffff" class="" id=""][/sharing][fusion_text]I was talking with a friend during the last week of 2014. It had been a long, and sometimes painful, year and I was plenty happy to say “see ya” to it. We were talking about the vision we each hold for this brand new year and I was talking about working towards something and my friend said, “Sometimes it’s just like flipping a switch.” And right then and there a switch flipped for me and I realized that the thing I had been “working towards” was right there for the taking. I just had to see it that way. So I did.
That got me thinking about how often we struggle with things unnecessarily. I remember my dad coming home one day after failing to make it a 1/4 mile in the run he’d gone out for. I was 14 and knew he’d been on the track team at his university but, though he appeared quite fit, he hadn’t run in ages. That day he came home and announced that he was quitting smoking. And he did. No trying, no failing, no drama, he just quit. He never smoked or spoke of it again. He flipped a switch and that was that.

I have a friend who did the same. One day she was a smoker and before she went to bed that night she wasn’t. The end.

I’ve been told that quitting smoking is brutal, and yet Dad and my friend just stopped. Clearly it’s possible to make a decision, to come to an awareness, and to then own it as if it has always been yours. You were this person, and now you are someone different in some significant way.

If you’ve been reading me for a while you know that I am not a fan of New Year resolutions. I think that they are a brilliant way to make us feel horrible about ourselves as we fail to meet the expectations that we set up simply because we’ve made another trip around the sun.

What if, instead of resolutions, you looked at the places in your life where you want to make a change and see if it is possible to simply flip the switch. Take a step back and see if you are, in fact, already where you want to be but just hadn’t noticed. Maybe the internal work you need to do has been done. Perhaps all that is left to do is come to a conscious awareness of what is already true for you.

It isn’t going to be this way in every area of your life, but I would be willing to bet that there is somewhere that this is true for you. Somewhere on the, probably long, list of things you would like to do differently or have be different about yourself, somewhere on that list is something you can flip the switch on. And once you have done it in one area of your life you realize that it is possible to do it elsewhere. We can let go of some of the struggle.